SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
AI Tool Hits $3.2m Revenue in 18 Months Using 7 Growth Tactics (Copy!)
02 Jul 2025
Chapter 1: How did Ricardo Ghekiere bootstrap BetterPic.io to $3.2 million?
Do you want $270,000 of month in revenue as a new founder? Well, you're about to meet Ricardo at Betterpick, a tool that enables you to create headshots and other content just from images of your headshot. He scaled from zero to $3.2 million, totally bootstrapped. He's kept full control, but here's the secret. He did this all using three specific growth channels. SEO, affiliates, and free tools.
And I said, Ricardo, I want my audience to learn all of this. Tell me how you did it. That's what you're about to learn over the next 20 minutes. Stick around for an unbearable advantage. And let's find out how Ricardo added so much revenue so quickly. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ricardo from Betterpick. These guys are on to something special.
They are building in public at betterpick.io, helping you get the most beautiful headshot you've ever seen. I mean, people see this headshot. They fall in love with you. They send you money. They just PayPal you money the second they see your Betterpick headshot.
Chapter 2: What growth channels did BetterPic.io utilize for rapid scaling?
That's what I hear. Over almost 30 million headshots already created. Very cool. So we're going to jump into all their growth tactics today. Ricardo, you ready to take us to the top? Yes, sir. All right. Is everything I said true? These headshots are the best they can find anywhere online? Oh, that's what we aim for, I would say. But yes, I would say yes. Oh, look at these beauties.
Take us through the product. What's the most popular feature here, use case-wise? The use case, the biggest use case we've seen is people using them for their CVs. So anything that they're applying for jobs, that would be the biggest use case right now. Second one is social media. So that's where they use it the most. So LinkedIn, anything related to like, you know, showcasing in public.
And third use case is what we call the about us sections. So if you're building up a new website or you want to showcase your face on a website, that would be the third biggest use case. Interesting. And you guys are seeing the use cases here on their site. This is their pricing today. Ricardo, let's not bury the lead. What's revenue today?
So this, we're about 270K per month so far in April 2025. Okay. And what does that look like in terms of growth rate? So if you're 275K today, where were you like a month or a year ago? So a year ago, I can actually quickly pull up the numbers. So a year ago, we would be doing about 3K per month, somewhere around that. That would be where we're at about a year ago in that sense. A lot of growth.
What is driven? Let's start from the beginning, right? So in 2024, around April, you're getting your first 5, 10, 20 grand a month in revenue. Where did that original traffic and customers come from? Yeah, I think the first original was we were testing a few channels, but they were too expensive. Google Ads, we've tried, we're through some money.
I think from the beginning, we did invest a lot in SEO. So from the get-go, so when we started December 2023, we set SEO first because with the average order value that we have, which is about $44, we needed to be SEO first because otherwise we would never get to profitability. So that's basically where we- Let's look at that. Yes. Yes. Let's look at that here.
So we're seeing the metrics from Ahrefs, right? So basically nothing in 2023, pretty explosive growth, domain rating, you know, grew pretty darn quick up to 57. What are you optimizing for right now? Backlinks, domain rating, site traffic, top pages, where are you focusing? So I think there's a couple of things. So we're doing a lot of backlinking. We're even buying backlinking.
So that one is one of the strategies. We're doing a lot of PR at the moment as well. That's where we're focusing on in this quarter as well. And before it was still a lot of blogging in that sense. I think we hit like five to 10 blogs per week. That's basically what we're pushing out right now.
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Chapter 3: What are the most popular use cases for BetterPic's headshots?
Who are you? How are you buying? A lot of people say we've tried to buy backlinks. They're always crappy backlinks. How are you buying backlinks? Did you hire an agency to do it or are you doing it yourself? Yeah, we got a couple of them. So we have an agency that suggested some backlinks. We will say yes or no, depending on our research in that sense.
We have like three agencies supporting us on that side. It's like a pay-as-you-go model. If we don't pay, you know, they don't get paid. So that helps as well. And then, of course, on the free PR things, that's mostly where we do more of the stunts or we go on podcasts and stuff like that. I love it. Stunts. We'll get into stunts here in a second.
Are you comfortable sharing maybe one or two of those agencies that you think give good backlinks? Yeah, but I would need to dig them up, I would say, because that's the SEO manager that is responsible for that. I'm a big believer of outsourcing where I don't have the knowledge. So I just trust the team. What is the team size today? So we're at, you know, Better Pick itself is about 13 people.
And then the new company, Better Studio, is around four. So in total, 17 people. Hold on. I didn't know about the new company. What's the URL? Betterstudio.io. Okay, tell me about this. This is officially your second product? That's the second product, basically, that we're launching. We're using the same technology we know at Betterpick.
We're applying that to the fashion market, which is more recurring and a much larger market in that sense.
How much, so forgive the sort of direct question here, but a lot of times, like I'm not a technologist, so when someone tells me we're using fancy technology to do this stuff, I can't tell if they're a really deep technologist and there really is a moat there, or if it's like a fancy wrapper on an LM or something else. What are you? Are you a fancy wrapper, or is there like deep proprietary tech?
There is deep proprietary tech in that sense, and we don't rely on any wrapper. Our base model is still Flux. It's about 30% of our core model in that sense, but the rest is the model that we've created in that sense.
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Chapter 4: How much revenue does BetterPic.io generate monthly?
Okay, so you've built your own, is it like a rag database with a frontier model in front of it or a chat interface in front of it? What's the actual tech stack look like there, the proprietary data set? Yeah, there's a lot about processing data, so how we get pictures in, how we transform them, how we put them onto models. There's different data sets, I would say, for BetterPic.
In BetterPic, it's mostly about how we rank pictures, how we upload pictures, how we guide you through that. Then it's how we label them, how we rank them, how we use data of people that like pictures and dislike pictures in order to generate new patches. So I think that's more important. of the wrapper, I would say, that you put on top. But I think that's a good picture as well.
So that's actually a growth, yes. Yeah, this is the money slide here. Okay, so again, you're telling us about what you did about a year ago to drive growth. These early months, it looks like it was heavy SEO focused. What else were you doing in the early days, growth-wise? Yeah, growth-wise, we were doing a lot of affiliate marketing.
That is also where I think this last month we did about 77K true affiliate marketing, 100K projected this month. So we're doing a lot of affiliate marketing. The reason why is because most affiliate managers, they are used to conversion rates of 0.5% to 1%. Our program actually allows you to go from 9% to 12%. Our best performer is about 12%, but we take an average of 9%.
So just to be clear, when you say in April, quote, we're going to do $77,000 of affiliate marketing, that's the new MRR or the new ARR, like the new annual contract, like just the dollar value? That's in months, basically. So the affiliates drove 77K of a revenue in total in that month. Oh, wow. Okay.
So of the $275,000 you did in MRR last month, April 2025, 77,000 of that, or almost 30% was affiliates. Yes. Wow. Okay. That's pretty impressive. How many affiliates drove that 77K? I can quickly pull that up. But that would be, I think in affiliate marketing, you mostly have like, at anything, you have like the top 10%. And then you have the 90%.
So I would say 10% is actually driven by the, you know, 100%, like 90% of the revenue is driven by 10% of the performers, basically. Which how many is that on a number for you? What is 10% of your affiliates?
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Chapter 5: What strategies drove BetterPic's initial customer acquisition?
Is that five affiliates, 30 affiliates, 39 affiliates? I think the top 10, I would say, yes, I would say even seven in that sense, seven, seven of them drove all that revenue. Wow. So let me ask you a question. I would obviously ask you to share your, I mean, are you open to sharing your screen and showing me your affiliate backend to coaches there?
Or is that like something you don't want to share? No, we're quite comfortable with sharing pretty much everything. So I can quickly share if he wants. People struggle this, Ricardo. So as you guys are listening to this, a lot of you guys, when you try to launch your affiliate program, you'll ask me questions like, well, Nathan, what commission structure do we set?
How do we go recruit affiliates? Where do we get them from? So Ricardo, you're doing it. You're doing it. I mean, it's working. Teach us. Yeah. So we got a dashboard here. This is just for this month so far. So give you an ID, but that's basically how we track. We kind of see what the revenue is coming in, what the average value is, what the purchases, what the weekly sales are.
So that's basically what we're tracking. And that's why I say like we keep track of like the top 10% because those are mostly what drive up all the revenue basically. Can we dive into the red one here, Anang Shah Al-Minyan? Who is that? Are they a YouTube influencer? Do they have a big email list? Are they a podcaster? What is that? This is actually funny enough.
She's a big YouTuber in that sense, but she also has a big Medium following. When she posts something on Medium, it actually ranks up because Medium has a big authority. Basically, if you type in Past AI Hedgehog Generators, in most countries, you will find her blog. She's the one backlinking to us. Interesting. Interesting. Now, what did you build your affiliate program on top of?
You used Rewardful? Yes. And so why aren't you screen sharing your Rewardful dashboard right now? Why do you feel like you have to go customize it in Databox? Because we basically have all our data in there. So we have all our data coming in. So affiliate performance, revenue split per source. So we kind of like centralize everything there.
I don't like to go back and forth to different tools in that sense. So we kind of like have everything in Databox. I see. Really interesting. What is global revenue split in that chart? Is that an important chart that you look at every day? The first one? This one? Not really. I think more we have like the source. So we kind of see like where is the money coming from?
Where is like the attribution coming from? So that's mostly what it is. Mostly my marketing manager actually looks at this. I kind of look at it from a global perspective. So we kind of have our financial models. I kind of more look at it from a general perspective where I think this is basically for reporting.
So we kind of see like what's the user growth, what's the gross revenue, net revenue, average customer spent. From a product perspective, I look at the refund rate, process to download rate. For us, it's important because there's a moment you process the images and then you actually download them, which is the aha moment, which is you drive value from the product.
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Chapter 6: How does BetterPic.io manage its affiliate program for high conversion rates?
Argon, Magic, Canva. Oh, you're here too. Better pick. They say you don't have a free version. Interesting. Well, we don't, if you look at it from that perspective, but yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just fun. Like, look, no one really has the answer yet to like how to show up in these LM results. People will say, well, it's all about like keyword clustering and semantic search and blah, blah, blah.
No one really knows, but, um, it's cool to see. I mean, look, the numbers don't lie, right? You're getting 20. I mean, you're getting a lot, thousands of clicks per month into your free tools. Is there anything else we missed before I let you go? We, I mean, we talked a lot about different things of growth. Anything I should be asking you about that I just completely missed?
Um, I would say I'm just looking at the metrics in that sense. Um, No, I think that's most of the metric. I have a lot of metric. I think what helps with sharing metrics is that one, you draw a lot of attention, but also our team also has a very deep insight into what's happening, how much revenue we're making, where is it spending, and allows them to operate at scale without me being there.
And I think that's what people misunderstand when you're sharing in the open. It's not just open towards the world, but it's also to your team, which allows them to operate at scale. And I think that's the beauty of building in the open, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, you guys, and obviously it's a good content marketing strategy for you guys as well.
All your stuff gets tons of engagement. So this is great. And I didn't ask, um, 275,000 a month in revenue. How many total customers is that? That's about, uh, five, 6,000, I would say, uh, that would be it. So let me pull that exact number up for right now. We got, uh, 5,974. Okay. Do you guys have, I mean, what's the monthly logo turn look like? The monthly what? Logo churn.
Oh, we don't have churn because it's a one-time purchase, basically. Oh, interesting. Oh, gosh. I didn't even realize that. No worries. Because you kind of just need a headshot one time. If you want to add some fluffy things, yes, you can probably do that recurring. But for the headshot, you mostly just need it once. So we bank a lot on that. I see. Oh yeah, of course.
It's right here on your pricing page. Now that being said, you can use the same technology and you start selling it to like businesses, right? So these are a once per person, but better studio. I bet you, you have recurring pricing here. Yeah, there we go. Got it. So this is the SAS play. That's the SaaS play.
So we're using that cash of the bootstrap business, which is actually quite nice to generate cash. It allows us to build the recurring business. We've got a lot more coming up for this one.
We are building a Chrome extension for consumers as well to go shopping, to kind of like just upload an image of themselves, click on a picture that they want to kind of see on them, and allows them to try it before they buy, basically. So that's also the B2C playbook we're playing for these guys. It's wild to see just the blending of B2C and B2B.
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